My favorite living oboist

My favorite living oboist

The Boston Phoenix, 12/9/94by Lloyd Schwartz

My favorite living oboist, Peggy Pearson, led off this season’s recital program at Emmanuel Church featuring music by two of Emmanuel’s great resident composers, J. S. Bach and John Harbison—who both seem to have written music directly for her. This quiet program was beautifully shaped, with transcriptions for oboe d’amore and strings of a difficult Bach organ trio sonata and the sublime Harpsichord Concerto in A major (BWV 1055), in which Pearson’s dark, otherworldly, almost disembodied tone seemed to be coming from behind a veil of strings. The slow movement—the oboe d’amore wreathing, writhing, and fainting in coils—is one of Bach’s great depictions of spiritual agony (and, of course, ecstasy).

Chorale Cantata begins with Pearson’s curlicuing oboe and a subtle reference to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” then moves through Martin Luther’s “De profundis” (“From deep despair I cry to you, Lord God”) to two spare, contrasting poems by Michael Fried (recitative and aria) about hopelessness (“My hand in the freezing water gropes for but fails to find a block of ice / On which to sign my name and the date and hour of my death”) and the faint possibility of hope (the tower of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is “A dark beacon / In the darker night”). It ends with the intoning of a poignantly square and skewed Luther chorale. A lot of people came to Emmanuel Church to express their admiration for Pearson. They left more grateful than ever.